Wednesday, July 20, 2005

Lynch For Meditation In Schools

The New York Postreports that director David Lynch, whose Inland Empire is hotly awaited by fans, is dedicating himself to raising funds for transcendental meditation classes and research on the benifits of yoga :

Tomorrow, the Oscar-nominated director of such graphically violent movies as Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive is announcing the formation of the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace.

Lynch has been a devotee of transcendental meditation and its founder, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, for 32 years. The foundation he'll launch with his own money will fund schools to set up transcendental meditation (or "TM") classes and pay for research on the effects of the yoga technique on the "brain and body." Lynch hopes to raise $7 billion within a year.....

Lynch, 59, says he decided "to stop being quiet" about his passion for the 47-year-old Hindu chanting technique after observing the sad state of education in U.S. schools. Today's students "are even more stressed out. Their schools are hellholes," he goes on. "They're getting pathetic educations. They're not going forward with full decks of cards."

Students who meditate, he says, "will start shining like a bright, shiny penny, and their anxieties will go away. By diving within, they will attain a field of pure consciousness, pure bliss, creativity, intelligence, dynamic peace. You enliven the field, and every day it gets better. Negativity recedes."

Lynch eventually hopes to organize "peace-creating super groups of 8,000 meditators" around the globe, all chanting simultaneously. Why 8,000? "It's the size of the square root of one percent of the world's population."

First of all, this is a terrific idea, and the logic behind it sound. Lynch's deck of cards would appear to be bounteously stuffed.

The Post should be reprimanded for unfairly pegging Lynch's films as "graphically violent." More reasonable would be "righteously inscrutable," "unsettlingly dreamlike," or "emporer's new clothes-y." On the other hand, I really hafta hand it to the Post for taking one for the journalistic team on this one - hearing Lynch speak the words "like a bright, shiny penny" is probably as close as you can get anymore to William Burroughs' hand on your knee.